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David L Craddock's 200,000 word feature chronicles the history of Black Isle Studios, the making of the Infinity Engine, and the games that they lead to and inspired. Richard Moss writes the oral history of the making of Assassin's Creed as told by its developers, Megan Farokhmanesh on the end of Telltale as told by the people who were there, New Frame Plus on how to animate a Smash Bros attack, alpha footage shown for System Shock remake, Melissa Kagen on how Firewatch problematizes toxic hypermasculinity and how walking simulators in general reject or undermine power fantasies, Fallout 76 and Hitman 2 gameplay footage, Jimmy Maher on the creation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, after playing the new Assassins Creed Seva Kritskiy asks if AAA games should be so ambitious to the likely detriment of their developers, Microsoft announces Xbox streaming service, Baldur's Gate 3 may be in production, and more.

Too Kyo Games, the new studio that brings together Danganronpa writer Kazukata Kodaka with Zero Escape creator Kotaro Uchikoshi, has unveiled its new game - a slight move away from visual novels towards 2D action called Death March Club.

Darksiders III reunites us with the horsemen of the apocalypse after a six year wait, this time putting us in the boots of Fury. This gameplay video, taken from a preview build of the game, shows off the game's fluid whip-based combat as Fury burns her way through a corrupted subway complex.

Warhammer games have been failing you. A couple – Blood Bowl, Space Hulk – have meticulously recreated the rules of their tabletop counterparts. Others, like Dawn of War, have captured the flame, fury, and nihilism that make Space Marines recurrently popular with teenagers the world over.

But none have committed to the satire or sheer strangeness found in the Warhammer universe – where hot-pink noise marines find pleasure in the cacophony of battle, and tribes on backwater worlds offer up raw materials for wars they’ll never hear the outcome of.

That tweet was posted in a resetera thread last night that claims that Divinity: Original Sin developer Larian Studios has acquired the license to the series and is currently working on Baldur’s Gate 3. Fargo’s tweet by itself doesn’t point to Larian, but the resetera post links to another thread claiming that Larian now own the series’ license.

Lost Words: Beyond the Page is a platformer with an unusual setting – a diary. You run and jump across both a fantasy world and written pages, using individual words to solve puzzles and help reshape the story. The title, from developers Fourth State and Sketchbook Games, has already pulled in a big set of awards over the past few years, and it’s now set to release in 2019.

Fallout 76 gameplay! We recently got to play the first couple of hours of Fallout 76, but before we bring you our more detailed hands-on thoughts and impressions, here's the first forty minutes of gameplay, completely uninterrupted.

The existence of microtransactions in Fallout 76 have some gamers worried; you can’t be too cautious in this age of Star Wars Battlefront II controversies. But in a recent tweet, Bethesda’s Pete Hines assuaged fears that players who spend real money on the in-game currency will be at an advantage.

Square Enix's action survival shooter left Left Alive, a return to the world of Front Mission being developed by "an all-star team of Armored Core and Metal Gear veterans," didn't leave much of a positive impression when we took a look at it in September. It was still fairly early along in the development process at the time, to be fair, although "it doesn’t just look unfinished, it looks uninspired," we wrote.

It only feels right to call the bikes in Steel Rats ‘choppers’, considering that their front wheels are also saw-blades, ideal for grinding through robots, letting players climb vertical walls and even adhere to ceilings. Tate Multimedia’s offbeat vehicular platformer is nearly ready to roll out, and launches on November 7th.

Coming off Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, the series is back with a brand-new numbered entry. Since the last game released in 2015, Koei Tecmo has been investigating what fans want, and have been trying to get the series to pick up steam on the competitive scene. With all that’s changed with fighting games over the years, we sat down with director Yohei Shimbori to see what’s new and what’s returning for the long-running series alongside his character picks for beginners and veterans.

As a campaign pack, the new DLC will add a new race and four Legendary Pirate Lords as their leaders. A new trailer (which you can view below) gives a flavourful taste of their army: there are zombies with guns, giant crabs, flamethrower-wielding constructs made of ship parts, and various undead monstrosities with oceanic mutations. It’s all very Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s possible there will be some overlap with the Vampire Counts, but the unique monsters, wide variety of cannons, and a new lore of magic (the Lore of the Deep) promises a pretty distinct playstyle.

Total War developer Creative Assembly has just unveiled the latest, much-anticipated campaign pack for Warhammer II. Curse of the Vampire Coast will flesh out the existing Vampire Coast faction with four new Legendary Pirate Lords and a roster of undead horrors, but despite the maritime theme, it will not add naval battles. There will, however, be a change to how naval fights are resolved.

Spider-Man lead writer Jon Paquette tells Polygon that lots of original ideas were thrown away in the creation of Insomniac’s latest game. But the upcoming DLC hasn’t been cobbled together from the extra bits left on the cutting room floor. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Available to Purchase 16 October 2018. Celebrate the wonder of global culture and the peak of international park entertainment in the World’s Fair Pack! Introducing themes and scenery from 10 new countries this pack features two new coasters, one new ride, a bountiful collection of new scenery, and an assortment of items from across the globe.

Surviving Mars: Space Race is the first big expansion for the red planet city builder, and it puts you on a mission of national patriotism to ensure your country represents the first and best colony on Mars. That means carefully selecting sponsors and competing against rival, AI colonies for the top spot.

Telltale Games laid off a majority of its employees in September in advance of a full studio shutdown, but a small group remained with the company in order to close out development on certain projects. Today, one of those employees reports that this group has now been laid off, too.

According to a statement from Skybound, the company will work with people from the original The Walking Dead team to finish the series. “Skybound will work with members of the original Telltale team to finish the story in a way the fans deserve,” it said.

Microsoft are the latest to hop on the game-streaming bandwagon, announcing Project xCloud today on the Microsoft Blog – a way to beam Xbox games direct to any device with a fast internet connection. While currently only in internal testing, Microsoft are rolling Xbox One hardware out to Azure datacenters around the world. While Microsoft recommend an Xbox controller (broadly supported via bluetooth), they’re working on alternative control setups for other devices, including touchscreens and (presumably) our more humble, less beefy PCs.

Microsoft is finalizing a deal to acquire the independent development studio Obsidian Entertainment, according to three people briefed on the negotiations. We don’t know if ink is on paper yet, and plenty of major acquisition deals have fallen apart in the final hours, but those close to the companies believe it is all but done.

As PlayStation users across the world wonder whether they’ll ever get to change their names from (or to) xx_gokusephiroth420_xx, the option now seems closer than ever. Developers of multiplayer games tell Kotaku that they’re preparing for PlayStation Network name changes to finally come soon.

Officially, Gallagher is stepping aside voluntarily, but insiders tell Variety that he was forced out by the ESA board. Variety was not able to determine why this happened, and ESA’s representatives declined to comment.

Electronic Arts is “closely monitoring” the controversy surrounding Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer star accused of a 2009 sexual assault that is at the center of a civil lawsuit filed recently. Ronaldo is the cover star, for the second straight year, of EA Sports’ FIFA series.

Chinese Taipei was officially disqualified from Hearthstone’s Global Games yesterday, after it emerged that some of their members were ‘stream sniping’ – watching the broadcast of the event in order to gain an advantage over their opponents. In the wake of the announcement, fans are questioning how easy the practice may be to pull off, and whether more measures should be taken to prevent it.

16 professional League of Legends players and coaches have been sanctioned ahead of the Worlds 2018 group stages. Four players have been issued fines, while formal warnings were issued to a further 12 figures from the game’s professional scene.

On August 26, a shooter at a Madden tournament in Jacksonville, Florida opened fire at the event, wounding 11 people and killing two, Taylor Robertson, 29, and Elijah Clayton, 22. This weekend, the organizers of Muthead, an independent Madden league, are holding a charity tournament to raise money for and honor the victims of the mass shooting.

Crowdfunding News (not sharing everything I find, just ones that look interesting, have known talent behind them, and a chance to succeed)

From the Sword Coast to the Deadfire archipelago, Beneath a Starless Sky explores the making of the Infinity Engine RPGs, the history of Black Isle Studios, and the development of Obsidian Entertainment's Pillars of Eternity franchise.

It’s perhaps fitting that a game with the tagline “nothing is true; everything is permitted” emerged from creative director Patrice Désilets bending the rules. Assassin’s Creed began life as a Prince of Persia game, expanded and reimagined for a new generation of consoles. You might say it even ended up feeling like one, though Désilets’ creative interpretation of Ubisoft’s mandate layered on many additional challenges for the team at Ubisoft Montreal.

Some bands tell stories with their music. Then there’s Coheed and Cambria, who’ve used eight of their nine studio albums to stitch together a gargantuan, interconnected sci-fi universe. The latest, Vaxis—Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures, releases on Friday; like the rest, it’s inspired and fueled in many ways by comics, movies, and even video games.

Indiepocalypse discourse is back in vogue again. Polygon published this article about how there’s too many videogames; Games Industry published this editorial about how we need to stop encouraging people to go indie. My response, on Twitter, was:

There aren’t too many indie developers. There are just too many indie developers who don’t realise that being an indie developer is like starting a band. It’s a thing you do and get value out of and, if you’re incredibly lucky, might even make you some money one day maybe.

Dozens of industry professionals and aspiring game makers attended this year's BAFTA Games Lecture to hear Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy discuss "the human cost of making games" and how it can be managed.

So, when I see expansive, overwhelming, graphically-intense games like Odyssey, Forza Horison 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Spider-Man all coming out within weeks of each other, I cannot help but think just how much literal sweat and tears went into these games, and just how much of that was underpaid, or even unpaid, overtime labour.

Games like Halo and Mario Kart were how I distracted myself from an emotional gauntlet exacerbated by societal negligence. My existence was deemed taboo by “family values” culture. Transgender issues just weren’t spoken of at home, school, work, chess club, or anywhere — as if the act of being queer was more controversial than a Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. The “Sundays belong to Jesus” crowd had essentially created an effective LGBTQ blacklist so extensive that the word “transgender” didn’t enter my vocabulary until adulthood. I often dreamt of my dying day so I could become a girl in heaven.

Seeing a black person in a game is still a strange experience more often than not. For the longest time, black characters seemed to fall precisely into two categories, scary and...funky. Both of these stereotypes are still very much alive, and yet I can also finally see some breakthroughs - games in which black people don't fill a role, and instead get to be just people.

Even the idea of representing history in a game could be considered inherently inaccurate: Games can be replayed and some (such as Total War) with different outcomes or events altogether. History, however, cannot be replayed and we cannot change the events that happened. So why is historic accuracy only an issue in games when women, people of color, or other minorities are involved? Historic games put a lot of effort into detailing and studying the era of their games, but many still have huge historical inaccuracies to streamline the game’s overlaid narrative or to seem more fun (think Assassin’s Creed, Battlefield, Total War). This is seemingly not an issue though until there are attempts at diversifying the game.

I don’t mean to imply that writing about videogames is bad in itself. I do have some very fond memories from those 10 years spent in the trenches. However, it’s a very tough job for me to love. The workload is often unreasonable, the environment is usually hostile, the pay is terrible, but, on the plus side, everybody hates you.

This article explores how the walking simulator Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) successfully problematizes toxic, traditional videogame hypermasculinity, inviting instead the performance of a care-oriented masculinity. Henry is characterized as a hypermasculine protagonist, but the game actively refuses to let the player perform that masculinity, enabling instead the performance of a subtle, complex, and well-developed male character. This destabilization is ludologically intentional and highlights a sensitivity towards the performance of non-hegemonic masculinities. If traditional games enable players to live out a fantasy life of performing hypermasculine acts, then walking simulators reestablish an anxious homogeneity of passive non-performance. Henry's macho presentation is belied not only by the genre of the game he inhabits, but by multiple feminizing factors in the text, including the prologue, the dialogue mechanic, and the way the game constructs the character's (and the player's) paranoid sense of mystery. As the denouement reveals, the danger that loomed was centered in real world challenges like environmental protection and familial guilt, better solved through conversation and patience than violent heroics. The kind of labour the character performs, compared with the adventuring accomplished by most videogame protagonists, underscores the complexity of his identity; though Henry works hard, his hard work is mostly confined to the realm of emotional labour and therapeutic self-care. This feminized labour is reflected in the gameplay as well, highlighting the divide between "hardcore" games (typically characterized as masculine) and the "hard" work associated with femininity. By playing with genre and subverting player expectations, Firewatch enables players to practice and perform masculinities beyond the hyper.

I’ve argued before that Ubisoft has a bad habit of piggybacking political divisions in order to market its games. But these moments of political insight — into Ancient Greece and the modern world — feel more organic, as if they were inserted by the writing team, rather than grafted on by a marketing campaign. Games are powerful vehicles for provocative ideas. It’s good to see the writers of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey are willing to embrace these issues.

An optional mode in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey makes the daunting journey of Ubisoft’s latest open-world adventure markedly more accessible for folks like me who can’t sink 15 hours into a game before it really gets good. It allows the player to quickly experience the game’s novel and inventive upgrades, while doing away with the grind that even the most enthusiastic critics have cited as an irritating blight.

Unfortunately, Odyssey’s creators have burdened the mode with a price tag — and the stigma that comes with it.

Last week, I finished the review for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and then packed my bags to go on a trip. I had some issues with the game, but largely I felt the improvements to the formula over Origins allowed it to keep pace with its predecessor. The trick with reviews and the following discussion is I don't generally talk with other reviewers about their thoughts and I've usually moved onto the next game; I tend to not be a part of the conversation surrounding a game. So I was surprised to find the conversation drifting towards Assassin's Creed Odyssey being "grindy".

The presence of microtransactions in a big video game can poison the player’s experience, leaving them to wonder if things have been designed in a way to drive them to pay extra. So it goes with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a very good $60 game that launched with at least $80 in microtransactions.

This paper investigates non-monogamy in videogames. As with LGBQT* issues, open non-monogamies are slowly making their way into multiple media forms (Rambukkana, 2015b). As the world of gaming becomes more layered and complex, non-monogamies gain in prominence both in game narratives, and in game cultures—from guilds and blog communities, to using in-game characters to cheat on RL relationships. These shifts in the texture of digital intimacy reflect and affect cognate shifts both in other mediascapes and in culture as a whole. Building on previous work on fringe and anti-normative sexuality in games (e.g., Consalvo, 2003; Shaw, 2013, 2015), this paper examines tropes of non-monogamy as an element of game and story design in AAA games and series (or similar) such as The Witcher, Catherine, Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Jade Empire. Do representations of non-monogamies in game narratives break with or reinforce mononormative and heteronormative tropes? How might challenging the normative dynamics of compulsory monogamy open up new and more complex game dynamics and narratives? We conclude that while representation of non-monogamy is growing, it is still largely along normative lines, but also that some alternative portrayals do exist and have the potential to add more complex and diverse narratives to mainstream games.

Level design is one of the cornerstones of good game design, but we’ve become so used to genre conventions that we pretty much know what to expect from levels once it becomes clear what genre a game is. 2D side-scrolling games are among the most staid of these, telegraphing its texture from being played for just a few minutes thanks to how extensive of a history the genre holds within the games industry. The difficulty ratchets up and some new mechanics are sprinkled in gradually, sure, but it’s very rare for you to be surprised by the level design in general. Somehow, though, The Messenger pulls it off, and it does so simply by recycling the levels you’ve gone through in one half of the game and completely changing the context of how you interact with them in the second, transcending genres and even video game eras in the process.

New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples wrote in his 1986 essay for Harper’s Bazaar, “Black Men and Public Space,” about the time when he understood out that his mere presence on the street made white women afraid. “It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into—the ability to alter public space in ugly ways,” he wrote. “Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians—particularly women—and me.”

This video would not have been possible without the generosity and help of Nathan, who was able to send me both a PAL PlayStation 2 and not one but two copies of An American Tail, and then didn't freak out when I decided to open the PS2 and swap the power supply with a North American PS2 so I wouldn't need to use a voltage converter. It worked just fine because all PS2 motherboards use +12 v DC power to minimize the cost difference between regions.

In the second installment of this 3-part series on the music of Final Fantasy VI, I take a look at how series composer Nobuo Uematsu evolves melodic material throughout the soundtrack using the brothers Edgar and Sabin's theme as an example.

Shadow of the Colossus is ranked among the greatest games ever made, if not for its innovative design then for its story. A story that is primarily told through the music. Lets look at how Kow Otani's soundtrack takes the wheel to deliver one of the most emotional video game experiences ever.

A version of this video was originally uploaded on February 25th, 2018. The video always bothered me because of the conclusions that I reached, which I don't feel are actually reflective of the game or the soundtrack. So I decided to revisit it and added 200 words toward the end, as well as made some minor changes in other places for clarity's sake.

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Have you ever heard of the time that Shigeru Miyamoto opposed so strongly to a new Mario item that he flipped a table?

Okay, maybe he didn't literally flip a table. That phrase comes from Satoru Iwata, who always seemed to have a wonderful way with words. We also like when he described himself as floating down in a parachute to fix Earthbound, but we've already made that video.

Over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg remade the very business of film-making for better or for worse, shifting its focus from message movies and character dramas to the special-effects-heavy, escapist blockbusters that still drive Hollywood’s profits to this day. These events, which we might call the rise of the culture of the blockbuster, have long since been enshrined into the canonical history of film, filed under the names of these two leading lights.